Saturday, January 17, 2009

The Fallacy of the Middle Ground: The Case of the O'Reilly Spin Zone

One of my favorite posters here reads my blog to balance the views of left wing blogs. He believes that if he sees all sides, he can find the moderate view, the happy medium, that is truthful because it takes all views into account. This is something like a Fox television program, the O'Reilly Spin Zone, where the announcer claims to be "balanced". O'Reilly, however, is anything but balanced. He gives two rather extreme points of view, call them the Progressive Republican and the progressive Democratic, then he splits the difference between them. The O'Reilly Spin Zone is characterized by its persistent omission of the most important issues facing the nation, especially monetary policy and the Federal Reserve Bank, which O'Reilly seems to believe is unimportant compared to the activities of shadowy speculators. Given that monetary policy is the one issue of crucial importance to his working class viewers, his claim that he "looks out for his viewers" is especially vicious.

There is no such thing as a happy medium much of the time. O'Reilly's claim is nonsensical. The truth does not lie in the middle. For instance, in the 18th century Dr. Benjamin Rush advocated bleeding as a cure for various illnesses. Today, physicians use antibiotics. Is the truth in the middle? Do you want your doctor to use bleeding half the time and antibiotics the other half? Or is bleeding based on an erroneous theory, so you are hopeful that your doctor dispenses with it?

How about astronomy in ancient Greece? I think it was Parmenides who believed that the universe was a sphere with the earth at the center, while Democritus believed that the earth revolved around the sun. Would a balanced view, that the center of the universe was midway between the earth and the sun, have been accurate? Or was the truth of the matter irrelevant to what either Parmenides or Democritus had to say?

In the 1920s Ludwig von Mises argued for the importance of price in the functioning of an economy, and that socialist coordination would be inefficient because of the absence of price. In the 1930s, Oskar Lange claimed to have disproven von Mises's arguments because socialist planners could equate marginal revenue product and price, but his argument is so laden question begging and circular reasoning that it is difficult to believe that anyone would have take it seriously. Yet, academic economists and sociologists for many years seriously stated that Lange had disproven von Mises. Many prominent scholars, such as Clark Kerr, advocated a "consensus" view of the "convergence" of capitalism and socialism in the 1950s. But this view of a happy medium was patently false. It was an extreme fallacy to say that there would be convergence. Von Mises and Hayek were right, Lange and Kerr were wrong. Kerr's "medium" view of socialism was an extreme one. Von Mises's and Hayek's view of the efficiency of information in a capitalist economy was an accurate and moderate one.

In 1989 the Soviet Union fell for the very reasons that von Mises and Hayek said it would. But not one of the academic economists or sociologists who insisted on the nonsensical convergence theory, the ancient idea of the happy medium, admitted that convergence was wrong because socialism failed. Rather, many continued to advocate socialism and to apologize for Lange's argument.

Today, we see on Fox News continued advocacy of the convergence doctrine, support for the bailout and the like, views which coincidentally favor the interests of Rupert Murdoch and various other contributors to the American Enterprise Institute, interests which do not have O'Reilly's viewers' happiness in mind.

There is no medium. Socialism fails because it interferes with the communication of information. Cognitive limits of socialist managers inhibit innovation. There is no in between. You either reward people fully for their innovation, or you don't. If you don't you get less innovation. You get the bailout, failed firms like Citibank and General Motors receiving massive taxpayer subsidies in the name of the "economy" and economically illiterate bozos on Fox telling us that it is good that the large firms steal from us. We should be grateful because it is midway between what the Republicans say and what the Democrats say. The bailout reflects the middle ground between the two. It must be right.

The fallacy of the middle ground may have evolved from a misinterpretation of Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that virtue is typically the mean, so that courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. There is a difference between ethics and science, though. Aristotle did not claim that truth was the middle ground, only that virtue is. It seems likely that those who believe in "moderation" and "the middle ground" are confused between virtue and truth. The truth depends on an accurate depiction of how the world behaves. The middle ground between two nonsensical views, such as those of the Democrats and the Republicans, is neither moderate nor truthful.

2 comments:

Interesting..I find it odd that you would use bloodletting as an analogy because I think that it actually proves my point more than it does yours. You’re sure that many ideologies are either up or down, black or white, while I think there is a grey/middle. I say “middle” because while I am not exceedingly “old”, I have lived long enough to see many things that I would have sworn that I believed in at the time, change with additional learning, and new perspective.

I’ll give you a couple of hypothetical examples.Example 1:Say we have a fervent opponent of abortion in all cases. This same individual has the unimaginable happen and their wife or daughter is brutally raped and impregnated as a result of this unspeakable act. His loved one looks at him in the eye, and tells him that there is no way she could bring this child to term with the knowledge that the unborn child’s father is a monster. Yesterday, this man was 100% confident of his beliefs and now he is not so sure that he was on the right path.

Example 2:There is a man who is disgusted by the idea of capital punishment. He is a college professor and thinks it is inhumane and Barbaric in practice. In addition, he has published several papers attesting to that fact(as he believes it to be). A day comes where he has the unfortunate situation of knowing the victim of a murder personally. The murdered individual is a life long friend of his who he has known since grade school who was shot in an attempted convenience store robbery gone bad (in which our professor was at the scene). To his horror, the perpetrator had been in jail for murder for the past 10 years and was recently paroled 3 months prior. Yesterday, he was an advocate for criminals; today he wants justice or an “eye for an eye.”

I am not arrogant or bold enough to say that what I believe today may not be different tomorrow.There are so many issues that I thought I fully wrapped my brain around, (including the economy, banking/financial planning) that have more or less blown up in my face. Now we have 60 year old economic and financial principals and concepts (which individuals won Nobel Prizes for) that stand on shaky ground at best.

At the same time, I am not saying that we should not all have concrete/ base beliefs. However, “I am saying” that we should all understand that ideology is an ongoing education and subject to modification. Is that really something that you disagree with? I do not think that it is an Earth shattering concept or “left” or “right” in nature.

You do not have to post this… I just wanted you to see through my eyes on the issue of middle ground.

Now I’ll give you a book to read in case you have not done so:The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb;

I would like to take a minute to correct a stupid point that I made in an earlier post. I wrote something to the effect of..”60% of the population voted for Obama, so should they be called left or the right?”After thinking about it, in the 1700s, 95% of the living white American population probably would have said that slavery is not only just, it is their God given right. That was obviously ignorant. My point being, majority does not make something correct. Even though I think it may in Obama’s case:-) Enjoy your week.

Yes, I have the Black Swan on my shelf and am planning to read it soon. Very important concept. Relates to a few ideas like bounded rationality and groupthink that are part of what I'm working on.

You are mixing moral with scientific issues. I conclude this post with the following paragraph:

"The fallacy of the middle ground may have evolved from a misinterpretation of Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that virtue is typically the mean, so that courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. There is a difference between ethics and science, though. Aristotle did not claim that truth was the middle ground, only that virtue is. It seems likely that those who believe in "moderation" and "the middle ground" are confused between virtue and truth. The truth depends on an accurate depiction of how the world behaves. The middle ground between two nonsensical views, such as those of the Democrats and the Republicans, is neither moderate nor truthful.The fallacy of the middle ground may have evolved from a misinterpretation of Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that virtue is typically the mean, so that courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. There is a difference between ethics and science, though. Aristotle did not claim that truth was the middle ground, only that virtue is. It seems likely that those who believe in "moderation" and "the middle ground" are confused between virtue and truth. The truth depends on an accurate depiction of how the world behaves. The middle ground between two nonsensical views, such as those of the Democrats and the Republicans, is neither moderate nor truthful. The fallacy of the middle ground may have evolved from a misinterpretation of Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues that virtue is typically the mean, so that courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. There is a difference between ethics and science, though. Aristotle did not claim that truth was the middle ground, only that virtue is. It seems likely that those who believe in "moderation" and "the middle ground" are confused between virtue and truth. The truth depends on an accurate depiction of how the world behaves. The middle ground between two nonsensical views, such as those of the Democrats and the Republicans, is neither moderate nor truthful."

The examples you give, abortion and capital punishment are moral issues involving right and wrong. They are linked to the idea of virtue (the virtuous person does right). Hume showed that morality is an emotional question. Aristotle did not say this but it is implicit in his emphasis on the middle way in ethics but he does not emphasize this in science. In science there is truth. In ethics the truth is the middle ground in Aristotle. That's similar to saying that ethical questions are different from scientific ones.

Peoples' ethics are emotional and so influenced by life events. A people that has seen the catastrophe of socialism is less likely to believe in socialism than one that has been told over and over how big an improvement it will be.

Truth is a matter of black and white. Morals aren't. The gray areas are moral questions. There is no gray about whether force equals mass x acceleration. f=ma is either true or false, black or white. Economics is not really a moral science. There is morality involved, but the first question is one of production. You cannot divide the pie if there is no pie. Socialism kills the pie, or stops it from expanding. That is a black and white question. Whether I am happy about harming people economically is a moral question for socialists.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.